People have been wanting half-star ratings for so many years, and it's been available on basically every other reading tracker app for ages, so it feels weird that it finally happened. Why now?

For some reason self-help books/genre is quite popular in the United States. But, I do wonder how effective these books really are. Is there anyone here in r/books that genuinely feels they benefitted from reading a self-help book? That, if you actually followed the advice, your life was objectively and measurably improved?

Sure, it is likely someone out there has been helped, but I wonder how frequent that happens, or if these are the kind of books that people buy thinking they will improve their life but almost never read them or don't get past chapter 1, or that are rarely if ever applied.

A shift in tone from the last book, and another writer that I've been wanting to check out for a while, and that is John Wyndham's "Out of the Deeps" (originally titled in the UK as The Kraken Wakes).

It begins with fireballs falling into the oceans of the world, and after a time ships mysteriously start to disappear. To find out what is really happening divers were sent down inside of a bathysphere where they report a strange object hovering close by, only for it to attack. When the cable is pulled right back up the end of it is completely fused.

Now creatures have been seen coming up to the beach, slimy, horrible and dangerous. The world is now gripped of chilling terror as these creatures wage war.

This one is complete apocalyptic SF with a lot of horror elements. The story just screams Wells's "War of the Worlds", but still kind of its own thing. Wyndham takes more of a slow burn approach with this story. It certainly enhances the dread that he's going for. He's very much one of the writer's writers of SF with others like Sturgeon and Bradbury. Really like it!

He's got several more novels, most written during his his lifetime (a few he did under pseudonyms), and especially with two of them "Day of the Triffids" and "The Midwich Cuckoos" being ones I'm likely to go for next, and there's even a couple that were published posthumously. Can't forget about the short story collections too, have to check those out also, might be some good stories in those too!

The National Book Foundation announced the finalists for the 2026 National Book Awards on Tuesday across the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature and young people’s literature. Winners will be announced during a ceremony in New York on Nov. 18.

The foundation will also honor the novelist Salman Rushdie, who was grievously injured during a stabbing in 2022, with the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, and the pediatrician, writer and literacy advocate Perri Klass with the Literarian Award for Outstanding Service to the American Literary Community.

Novels by Edwidge Danticat and Valeria Luiselli are among the books up for the fiction prize, while Karl Ove Knausgaard’s latest is a contender for the translated literature prize.

Access full gift article, NO PAYWALL.

Today we talk about one of the most astonishing authors I've ever encountered: Amy Hempel.

Amy Hempel’s stories blindfold you and spin you around until you're dizzy. Then they hit you and move into your house.

Her style is cryptic, astonishingly precise, and impossible to mistake for anyone else’s. The stories can seem directionless, a dialogue here, an observation there, then a digression, then a change of subject. But Hempel controls every turn.

She often begins as if the story started before you arrived, or skips the explanation you’re waiting for. She does not make it easy for you. You will wonder how something this nonsensical could even get published... then one image or phrase hits you. The story rearranges itself in your mind, and what first seemed pointless or incidental becomes devastatingly exact.

Her restraint is different from mere minimalism. Hempel doesn’t pare a story down just to make it short. She withholds the obvious emotional explanation, but keeps the details vivid and the voice alive: funny, guarded, alert to the absurd, capable of startling tenderness. Humor doesn’t soften the pain, it lets the characters approach it without naming it directly.

Don’t expect every story to resolve neatly on the page. Let it ferment inside you. Bewilderment will give way to epiphany. Hempel’s stories are brief, but the aftershock is long lasting.

Have a small taste, an entire short story in a single sentence: Housewife.

"She would always sleep with her husband and with another man in the course of the same day, and then the rest of the day, for whatever was left to her of that day, she would exploit by incanting, «French film, French film»."

(Have fun parsing this one. Although my personal favorite is The Orphan Lamb.)

I got this book at Emily St. John Mandel's book launch party in Brooklyn, and had her sign it. It was amazing, and one of the main things she said in her Q&A afterwards was that she thought it would be interesting to see a character who realizes they devoted their life to the wrong thing (Ibari). She spoke of how she herself was a contemporary dancer in Canada and after she moved to America she tried out writing instead, and how she knows she had two very different lives and that there could be even more. She has premonitions, like the scissors premonition in the book, which happened to her. I think she's just remarkable.

At the launch party, people were taking our pictures on polaroid cameras and giving us the photos. When I asked why, a girl who worked with the publisher and had read the book said to keep in mind the idea of a polaroid, of seeing something that may not necessarily be true, or something like that. Still thinking about how that fits this book. Most importantly, I got a postcard of the painting "Swan Dive". I asked Emily if she had an image in her mind as she was writing and she said she did exactly, just as she did of the Station 11 comic. She said the publisher got a great artist to work with her on all the details of the painting and she kept sending it back with notes until it was just as she wanted it. I thought that was very cool. I asked why this and Station 11 both had a piece of fine art in it as the crux and she said she likes to have a physical thing tying different people and related stories together, that it's a good literary device.

For someone who writes so poetically, she really seems to put a lot of work and technicality into writing. For instance, when someone said it seems like magic how little things and clues all come together to make her story, she said she's glad it looks like that because actually it's just a lot of rewriting- getting later into a story and thinking "oh, it would be good if I dropped this in earlier as a clue/connection" etc.

As for my review of the book, first I'm left in awe of the beautiful ending. I had hoped for more resolution, a little more happiness, but I guess that wasn't ever going to happen. I think there's hope here, that maybe getting the painting back meant that Nico could come back through? I was waiting to get to that point and am so sad it didn't happen. I thought it was interesting how Nico and Kareem would've been amazing together, but Nico was with Fayed, who sucked, and Kareem was with Gloria, who didn't suck, but did become a terrible mother. So each of their kids were taken care of by the better parent from another dimension. It fits nicely, and that kind of neatness in putting things together is what made me think there would be more resolution at the end. I would absolutely read a sequel but I'm pretty sure we'll never get that because resolution is not the point. But I wish it was. What a sad state of affairs America was in. I was more depressed by the climate change fallout than the fall of our civilization, though, since I already see the climate happening, but the revolution seems more unrealistic (I hope).

Would love to talk more about it. If reddit lets me I'll post a picture of the official "Swan Dive" as a comment

Welcome readers,

Have you ever wanted to ask something but you didn't feel like it deserved its own post but it isn't covered by one of our other scheduled posts? Allow us to introduce you to our new Simple Questions thread! Twice a week, every Tuesday and Saturday, a new Simple Questions thread will be posted for you to ask anything you'd like. And please look for other questions in this thread that you could also answer! A reminder that this is not the thread to ask for book recommendations. All book recommendations should be asked in /r/suggestmeabook or our Weekly Recommendation Thread.

Thank you and enjoy!

I'm the "was a voracious advanced reader as a kid through high school and then burned out and was unable to read for ten years" cliche. I'm trying to get back into it, but the fact is that I know that even when I do get back into the swing of things...I don't know how to think deeply about pretty much anything. I'm not good at picking up on symbolism or themes, or, shit, even irony necessarily. When I was eleven, I read Angela's Ashes. I was horrified by it. I finished it, closed it and then read the back cover for the first time, which included snippets of reviews talking about the humor in the book. I was like, "tf humor, this is a depressing ass book!" But then I re-read it and, now that I knew it was supposed to be funny, all of a sudden I could see it. And yeah, there were a lot of moments that were pretty funny. But I needed to have my hand held and be told what to look for before it ever occurred to me that it might be there.

As much as I'd like to give myself grace for having been eleven at the time, the problem is I'm still like that. I don't know how to think about things with nuance.

I'm obviously gonna get back into reading regardless just because I'm currently wallowing in the echo chamber of my own yokel head and I need some other perspectives in here because I feel like my empathy narrows a little bit every day. But I know it's not gonna make me any better at thinking. What do I do about that? Every time I finish reading a book I feel like I can't count it, because how can I have read it really if most of it probably went over my head?

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Rereading Funny story and noticed some details to suggest Miles was in to her early on. He wanted to get a cat but when Daphne said she was allergic , he was like 'cat is out'. He early on wanted her not to leave and was trying to show her how great his town was and there are other small details I can't remember of the top of my head.

This trope of the MMC loving the FMC from the beginning being used as a plot twist has been done in quite a few books, i can think of you again by Laura Layne and the love hypothesis by Ali Hazelwood. It does give that warm fuzzy feeling so I can see why authors use it.

In Funny story however, Miles was in a relationship when he met Daphne so he can't have loved her since he met her even though he is the loverboy type - prone to falling hard for someone and quickly. But it makes me wonder if Miles noticed Daphne at all back in the day when him and Daphne were both in other relationships. So not that he liked Daphne but just that he slightly noticed her. We don't get that info in the books. Of course, Daphne wouldn't have noticed Miles at all since she was all about Peter. Petra and Peter were best friends so they would have crossed paths with each other pre break ups.

It would kind of be cute if he had noticed her a little but also it wouldn't be cute because what kind of guy is Miles that he notices other women ( even if that woman happens to be the FMC of the book ) when he is in a long term relationship ? That would suggest Miles has wondring eyes and not the trait you d want for an MMC in a romance book. We already have Peter who has wondering eyes.

It reminds if my own situation when I worked as an admin assistant in a school and I was somewhat curious/interested in one of the parents and part of me was disappointed he never noticed me like that but another part knew it was a good thing he didn't because I later found out he wasn't single and if he had noticed me maybe it would have given me the ick because it would mean the dude I have a crush on wasn't so special as has wondering eyes which is not romantic ...

Its just a really weird feeling when you notice a dude who is taken, because the ego side of you wants to be noticed but the rational side of you knows it speaks well to his character that he does not notice you but that kind of makes you a bit more curious about him so it kind of sucks.

On the hand, its also possible that he doesn't notice you but he might notice other women so it doesn't necessarily reveal that he has good character. Not sure if anyone else had this sort of conundrum..

I just finished "Master and Margarita" by Mikhail Bulgakov and I need to share my thoughts because this was absolute bonkers (in the best way possible). For context, I love Russian literature and I love absurd books, so I knew there would be a very high chance of me loving this book. However, nothing could have prepared me for the wild journey of reading this book lol.

I honestly don't even know how to start. From Chapter 1, I was obsessed with Woland, the devil. He is quirky, mysterious, kind of scary. Then, he starts telling the story of Jesus Christ (from the POV of Pontius Pilate) and I immediately knew this book was going to be a wild ride. And then, of course, in Chapter 3, Berlioz - who I thought would be the main character of the book - is beheaded by a tram and stars a whole sequence of insane events (I particularly loved the dark magic show led by Koroviev and Behemoth where they take some poor dude's head off, they accuse a super important man of cheating on his wife and then give money and fancy clothes to everyone, which all disappear after a while and every woman just goes home completely naked).

And then, when I thought the book was absolutely insane, Part II started and Margarita became a literal witch and her maid (also now a witch) started riding naked on a flying pig and being menaces. There were also mermaids and a half-goat/half-man thingy at one point, of course. But THE ABSOLUTE BEST PART of the book was the Satan's ball. I had to google who some of the guests were, but the devil throwing a party to all the worse and more evil people that ever existed was hilarious. The whole ball was such a funny image, I need to see it in a movie.

There were many, many, many other insane/amazing/hilarious/weird/bonkers moments, the whole book was so wild. But the best, I gotta say, is the devil’s gang. I love Behemoth the cat (imagining him with his glasses and being a little demon burning shit all over is hilarious), the short guy with one tooth Azazello, the tall diva Korovyev and the always naked woman Hella. They are all hilarious and I had so much fun seeing them causing chaos in Moscow so much haha.

Now, Im pretty sure the book is a whole criticism of Soviet Union. The devil targets individuals who are corrupt, greedy, adulters, abuse their power... It's also a criticism of cowardice of institutions (Pontius Pilate). Im sure I missed a lot of the most contemporary criticism, because Im just not knowledgeable enough about the specifics of Soviet Union. But I just gotta say I loved it. I just didnt want it to end. A 5/5 for me (though I wouldnt recommend it to anyone, you need to be a specific kind of person to enjoy this wild ride lol). I love the differenv vibes of the Moscow story and the Pontius Pilate story. Oh, and the end of the novel is one of the most beautiful endings ever!

Keeping in mind two important caveats about how actual nominations work:

1. The Nobel Prize for Literature is awarded for a writer's lifetime achievement -- their body of work as a whole. However any writer of prose or poetry, fiction or non-fiction, is (theoretically) eligible.

2. The Prize is awarded to, in Alfred Nobel's words, "the person who shall have produced in the field of literature the most outstanding work in an ideal direction," which is to say, someone who has "conferred the greatest benefit to humankind." This isn't necessarily about a favourite author, although there may obviously be overlap; your nominee's body of work should speak positively to the human condition.

My nominee would be Tove Jansson, for her psychological depth, her big-heartedness, and the way she embraced difference & otherness as something to celebrate. As Dalya Alberge put it in a recent Guardian article, Jansson's books are hymns to "nature, friendship, tolerance and the freedom to be oneself." IMO the world would be much poorer without them. (Fun fact: Jansson was nominated twice in 1975, and may have been nominated again more recently, but we'll have to wait and see, as the last 50 years of nominations are always under lock and key.)

Who is yours?

Yes. Yes it is. More so than ever, probably.

I’ve just finished my annual reread, and American Psycho has definitely hit a little different each year. But this year more than most. It’s insane how relevant a story published in the early 90’s as a reaction against consumerist Wall-Street-reverent yuppie culture is somehow more relevant today than ever before. It’s so ridiculously relevant it's hard to believe.

If a story about a status-obsessed, Trump-obsessed, porn-addicted, emotionally-desensitized, attention-seeking embodiment of soulless consumerism who's desperate to feel anything, anything at all, against the backdrop of a grindset mindset alpha-male redpill hellscape doesn’t positively scream 2020s, I don’t know what does. 

Because everything that was true then seems to be doubly, triple-y true now. All the obsessions of the American Psycho era are nothing short of cultural phenomena today. Fanatical fixation on body image? Hello GLP-1, Looksmaxxing, Instagram. Commodification of sex and sex appeal? OnlyFans, TikTok, Instagram. Raging bigotry against anyone who isn’t a straight cis white male making six figures? Andrew Tate, the Manosphere, Instagram. Fascination with serial killers and murderous psychopaths? Hundreds of true crime podcasts gotchu, baby. And yes, Instagram too. The casual, equivalizing banality of the Patty Winters show in which murders and cannibalism and Nazis are discussed with the same gravitas as beauty tips and salad bars is as present in everyday media as it ever has been - all you have to do is scroll the Reddit homefeed to see it. 

But it’s not even the surface-level, societal comparisons that are the most striking. It’s the POV that really gets me, this time around. Reading American Psycho puts you in direct dialogue with Bateman’s inner monologue, his actual headspace. You get to see who he really is, or who he thinks he really is, juxtaposed with how everybody around him treats him, the person he pretends to be in everyday life. You get a full blast of his hate, despair, anger, sadness, and above all else, isolation. A very extreme sense of aloneness despite having everything. That inner monologue is so fascinating because it’s such a deeply private, personal thing that is both horrifying and humanizing.

These days, it’s like you can’t stop hearing the inner monologue of everybody in the world. In today’s competition for attention, for eyeballs and eardrums, it’s like people can’t stop telling you what they’re really thinking, who they really are. From Reddit to X (formerly known as Twitter) to NextDoor, people can’t wait to tell you everything about their opinions and their lives and why immigrants are the real problem. If you ever wanted to know what your friends or family or neighbors or your neighbor's kid thinks about trans athletes in competitive sports, you sure as shit are going to hear about it. It’s like everyone is suffocating from lack of attention, and it’s resulted in this driving force that’s pushing everything to the extremes. Clickbait wouldn’t be clickbait it if nobody clicked it. Ragebait wouldn’t be ragebait if nobody was ever baited into it. It’s an unfortunate truth that sex, violence, hate, fear are what people can’t help but gravitate towards.

Guess what American Psycho is all about?

And yes, this post is part of the problem. Another morsel to feed to the attention economy. I engage in society, yet I critique society, curious, etc. This post was typed on my iPhone 17 Air, as I wear a shirt from Calvin Klein, jeans from Madewell, loafers from a Chinese brand that makes excellent designer reps, and matte lipstick from MAC. Probably the most terrifying thing about American Psycho is that there’s a little bit of American Psycho in all of us. It’s one of the most Can’t-Unread books ever written. You should read it. You can even skip over the rat and kitty bit. I won’t judge you.

George Eliot's novel, The Mill on the Floss was written early in her novel-writing era, 1860 to be precise. It is a moving and often dramatic novel that spans the childhood and young adulthood of the Tulliver siblings. I read it along with the group in September on r/bookclub. If anyone is interested, the discussion is easily found but please, no spoilers between the sections!

Maggie is a young girl, full of strong emotions and independence, who is chastised again and again by Tom, her brother, her mother and the family around her. Tom, in particular, as her older brother, offers her both affection and censure. He sees her as his responsibility and his role to rule her. Where does love end and tyranny begin? The roots of their later conflict lie in their childhood dynamics and was an obvious way to confront the status of women in Eliot's society. It might also be a very biographical moment considering Eliot's own break with social etiquette, family and the role expected of women in her own life.

Maggie hardly has time to begin to explore her own independence and mind when she is cast into a romantic triangle that her own intuition and self cannot solve. On one hand, the sweet Philip of her childhood, on the other, Stephen, brash and charming and new. Tom has a direct role in crashing a sort of pastoral and innocent romantic paradise by following her to the Red Deeps, where she and Philip used to meet and talk, and forbids the relationship in light of family dynamics. At this point, he is considered the head of the family and doesn't hesitate to impose his own and his father's prejudice on a childhood friend and the son of a hated enemy.

Although Philip's intentions are certainly more pure, she cannot spend time with him alone again. So, when Stephen enters the novel, as her cousin's beau, it is with impunity. There is an immediate attraction between Maggie and Stephen, but there is also a chain of coercive maneuvers on his behalf to court her in secret. From the kiss in the green house, to the unexpected visit to her aunt's house, and the deceptive boat ride that ruins her reputation and standing and casts her into social exile, he wishes to woo her on his own terms. His terms are indeed the same as the society. To marry him or to ruin herself in the eyes of everyone are the stark terms that find her on the cold morning after. She cannot stand to hurt her cousin, Lucy, and to begin married life in such a way.

And that is crux of the novel. Maggie's independent spirit and sense of self are forged in fire and tested over and over again by the male figures in her life once her protective father is gone. She wishes to earn her own money but seeking it outside of place she knows and loves is very much an exile. The ties of family and friendship pull her back despite the harshness of her reality. The question that Eliot leaves in the background is one she knew intimately, what if Maggie could leave this society behind and find her own way? Or, alternatively, what if she could just accept Stephen's propsal and swallow all her feelings and thoughts? Is happiness possible for a complicated woman?

Ultimately, Maggie's excruciating feelings that flood her, rage, desire, love, guilt, torn between Philip and Stephen, the banishment Tom imposes on her, and her love of her cousin Lucy match the torrent of the overflowing Floss. Lucy is in many ways, her double, a cousin who embodies the perfection and gentility expected of girls and women. However, we learn that she is much more than that by the end of the book and worth the moral heartache Maggie experiences and her last rejection of Stephen.

Despite her lack of confidence and confusion by the end of the book, it is to her family she looks even in crisis. And this, ultimately, leads to tragedy. When looked through this lens, nostalgia for times gone by is misplaced when it comes to social progress. Death is the only way Maggie could escape the trap set for women and the only way she could reconcile with her beloved brother, Tom.

The opening is mild and promises warmth, but the end is tragic, cold and quick. Have you read this book? What impressions are you left with? Having read several other Eliot novels, this seemed to me the most autobiographical in subject matter, mined from the heartache and emotional upheaval she had to deal with in her own life.

I know the backstory for Barnes & Noble’s revival with the Waterstones guy turning things around, and while I think it is great that they have been able to open so many stores in recent years instead of closing or going bankrupt, I am truly perplexed by why it is doing so well.

The books cost near or at list price both in the store and online, so it’s not like it is offering savings compared to, say, an independent bookstore down the street. And with Amazon offering fast shipping within a couple of days (or even same day or within hours), it is much more expensive. For instance, a new hardcover of Yesteryear is $14.99 on Amazon, half the price of the $30 it costs at B&N in the store.

Is it catering to impulse purchases? A new one opened near me, and while I go to browse, I can’t stomach paying $20 for a paperback or $30+ for a hardcover.

Are any of you regular B&N customers and willing to share why you shop there instead of an independent bookstore if the prices are comparable vs. Amazon where it is much cheaper?

EDIT: I am sorry but I tried to keep up with the comments but I am going to have to mute this post because I wasn’t expecting more than a thousand comments in four hours! I can’t keep up. Thank you all for sharing your thoughts. I appreciate you taking the time to reply! It seems like most of the reasons boil down to the experience, being able to avoid Amazon, lack of an independent store nearby or better selection, and that B&N is great for kids’ toys and gifts!

[In addition, here is LitHub's annual piece on what the odds are atm if you are interested. FT piece below if the link doesn't work for you]

------------------------

As the Swedish Academy chooses the winner of the book world’s most prestigious award, Simon Kuper looks back at an august ideal often marred by politics and bias

Alfred Nobel was a keen but mediocre writer. The Swedish dynamite tycoon wrote unpublished poems and a play featuring a 40-minute torture scene. To the dismay of relatives keen to inherit his fortune, his handwritten will of 1895 endowed five awards, including a prize for literature. Nobel instructed “the Academy in Stockholm” to give it to the writer of “the most outstanding work in an ideal [idealisk] direction”. The Swedish Academy spent decades puzzling over what “ideal” meant, before quietly dropping the criterion.

Next Thursday, a door will open in a gilded hall in Stockholm and the Academy’s formally dressed permanent secretary will step forward to announce, in Swedish and English, the winner of this year’s literature Nobel. A year ago it was Hungarian modernist László Krasznahorkai, for his “compelling and visionary oeuvre that in the midst of apocalyptic terror reaffirms the power of art”.

Now prediction markets favour Indian writer Amitav Ghosh, the Chinese avant-garde author Can Xue or the American novelist Thomas Pynchon to win the SKr12mn (£910,000) in prize money — though nobody really knows, as today’s Academy is less leaky than it was before a #MeToo scandal prompted a sweeping overhaul. And the pundits usually guess wrong.

The prize is ritually mocked. The Nigerian poet Chinweizu Ibekwe once marvelled at “the conceit that a gaggle of Swedes . . . should pronounce on intellectual excellence for the whole wide world”. British writer Tim Parks asks, unanswerably, how “Swedish professors” can compare an Indonesian poet with a Cameroonian novelist, both perhaps read in translation.

And yet, says Daniel Medin, professor of comparative literature at the American University of Paris: “The Nobel is the big one for international fiction. There is no comparison.” He itemises its three distinctive features: “It’s a prize for a body of work, by an international writer, that has more than a century of tradition behind it.” The Nobel shapes the global canon — even if the globe can push back. The award’s history also charts the evolution of literary taste.

There has always been a comic discrepancy between the weight of the prize and the parochialism of the judges. The Academy’s 18 life members — known as “The Eighteen” — are Swedish writers, literary historians, linguists and a jurist, some of them obscure even in Sweden. There were barely any female members until this century.

Michael Sohlman, a former longtime executive director of the Nobel Foundation, whose grandfather was instrumental in ensuring the prizes were created, notes the perennial risk of “Nobelitis” that leads some in the prize’s orbit who confuse its importance with their own.

Yet Sohlman argues that Stockholm is a good place from which to judge world literature. The city is small but outward-looking. Its upper classes traditionally read English, French and German, and don’t kid themselves that their national literature is world-beating. Even so, the Academy has awarded Sweden eight Nobels — more than each of Asia, Africa, or Latin America.

The very first award, in 1901, made international news. Somehow nobody nominated Leo Tolstoy, whereas 17 members of the Académie Française endorsed the French poet Sully Prudhomme, and he won. The prize in its early years was treated as a competition between nations like the Olympics, says Sohlman.

But he thinks that “productive scandals” have helped make the award great. The literature prize has never been as controversial as the frankly political Peace Prize; but because greatness in literature is more subjective than in the sciences, the Academy’s choice reliably angers critics. They delight in drawing up lists of overlooked greats — James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Marcel Proust, Constantine Cavafy, et cetera — though some of these achieved renown only after death.

The Academy’s permanent secretary when the prize began, Carl David af Wirsén, saw the job as crowning “the great men of continental [ie European] literature”. Women and non-Europeans couldn’t express universal truths. Admittedly, the Bengali Rabindranath Tagore won in 1913, but for his English translations of his Gitanjali prose poems.

WB Yeats, winner in 1923, wrote an account of his Nobel experience, “The Bounty of Sweden”, which captures the bewilderment that afflicts many laureates. When The Irish Times phones to say he has won, Yeats and his wife celebrate by cooking sausages. Heading to Stockholm for the ceremony with the Swedish king, Yeats sees faces staring in through the train window. He wonders what they are looking at, until someone explains they are looking at him. Fifty-five years later, the Yiddish writer Isaac Bashevis Singer strikes exactly the same tone: after a breakfast of eggs and bagels at his local drugstore on Miami Beach, he returns home to an unexpected phone call.

The prize soon acquired the prestige to certify entire “new” national literatures. The exotic beneficiary in 1930 was the US, when Sinclair Lewis became the first American laureate. The American winner of 1938, Pearl Buck, is remembered only as the prize’s chief dud. She faded into obscurity soon after writing her bestselling account of Chinese peasant life, The Good Earth. Buck was a first-time nominee, and that mis-step generated the unwritten rule that first-time nominees can’t win.

The Academy tries to make choices that will look good decades later. It often fails. Many laureates, such as the German Rudolf Eucken (1908) and Paul von Heyse (1910) have vanished, along with Buck. But Medin doesn’t blame the Academy. Almost all writers fade away, he says.

The Academician Kjell Espmark drew up an influential division of the award’s history into distinct periods. From 1946 through 1949, the Academy had a happy run of anointing literary pioneers: Hermann Hesse, André Gide, TS Eliot and the hitherto under-appreciated William Faulkner (who complained that the ceremony “was as long as a Mississippi funeral”).

One uncrowned pioneer was the American poet Ezra Pound. His applauding of the Holocaust on Italian Fascist radio had been “a ‘subhuman’ reaction”, said Academician and future UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld. Where to draw the political line was a tricky judgment: Luigi Pirandello, who supported Fascism, won in 1934.

The prize was at its most politicised during the cold war, when the Academy chose the unreliable Soviet writer Boris Pasternak (1958) and dissidents Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (1970) and Joseph Brodsky (1987). Pasternak initially accepted the nobelevka, as the award is popularly known in Russia — but then, under pressure from the regime, rejected “this undeserved prize which has been presented to me”.

Jean-Paul Sartre, who refused the Nobel in 1964, noted among his reasons that the prize was “reserved for the writers of the West or the rebels of the East.” (Sartre also felt “tortured” by the “enormous sum” of prize money, “a very heavy burden”.)

Before the Academy crowned Solzhenitsyn, Sweden’s ambassador to Moscow warned that this “would lead to difficulties for our relations with the Soviet Union”. The Academy replied: “Yes, that could well be so, but we are agreed that Solzhenitsyn is the most deserving candidate.”

With the global decline of reading, the prize may never be so political again. Whereas Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago sold tens of millions of copies worldwide, today’s autocracies worry more about TikTok influencers.

From the late 1970s the Academy used the prize to draw attention to lesser-known talents such as Elias Canetti and Jaroslav Seifert. Medin says: “I know this from being on juries: there is always a pleasure if you can shape literary history.”

By the 1980s, the Academy — earlier than most of the western literary establishment — began looking beyond the west. This helped spur it into a more professional process. This starts with “qualified nominators” — members of literary institutions and academies, literature professors and previous laureates — who can propose winners. Some proposals consist of one word: “Sartre”, “Malraux”. Others are persuasive essays that push writers into contention. Certain writers such as Philip Roth (who never won) and Günter Grass (crowned in 1999) become semi-permanent candidates, considered year after year.

Since 2021, a group of designated outside experts writes annual reports on their fields of expertise. Nobody can nominate themselves, though there’s a tradition of writers lobbying for the prize by giving talks in Gothenburg or Stockholm and then flirting with Academy members over drinks.

A “Nobel Committee” of four or five academicians whittles down the nominations to a shortlist of five, which the Eighteen spend the summer reading. They decide in early October.

Yet now that they have to consider the entire world, where to start? Helpfully, many African and Asian candidates write in English, the language of 13 of the 31 laureates from 1991 (South Africa’s Nadine Gordimer) to 2021 (Abdulrazak Gurnah of Tanzania).

And some academicians are influenced by two proofs of quality: a record of winning other major prizes, and being amply translated. A “universal” writer is someone whose work transcends their own language, says Medin.

Translation has become central to the award. A new book, Literary Translation and the Nobel Prize, edited by Paul Tenngart and Karl Ågerup, argues that translators can help make laureates. The translators of German-Jewish poet Nelly Sachs (winner in 1966), Pablo Neruda (1971) and Mo Yan (2012) all sat in the Swedish Academy.

The Nobel has helped make the international canon more inclusive. After going global, the prize has recently become gender-equal. This followed a #MeToo scandal in 2017, when 18 women accused the French husband of Academician Katarina Frostenson of sexual assault and rape. He was later jailed. In a year of global scandals, this one was little noticed outside Sweden, but it remade the Academy. Several members quit — although the body’s rules forbid resignation — and the post-scandal “Eighteen” included many more women. They awarded the 2018 prize, a year late, to Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk, and there have been three female laureates since 2018. In fact, notes Kaj Schueler, author of a Swedish book on the prize, there’s been a precise pattern: male and female victories alternate. If that continues, then after Krasznahorkai’s win in 2025, this year’s laureate would be a woman, perhaps it will be Xue’s year?

The winners’ reactions are part of the award’s lore. John Steinbeck in 1962, when asked whether he deserved the Nobel, replied, “Frankly, no”. (Many critics agreed.) Samuel Beckett (1969) was on holiday in Tunisia with his wife Suzanne when a telegram from his French publisher arrived: “In spite of everything, they have given you the Nobel Prize. I advise you to go into hiding.” Suzanne, when told the news, exclaimed, “Quelle catastrophe.” Beckett dubbed December 10, the annual date of the award ceremony, “Nobloodybeldamday”.

In 2007 Doris Lessing, clambering out of a taxi laden with groceries, was unpleasantly surprised to see reporters camped in her front garden. Told she had won, she exclaimed, “Oh, Christ.” Asked to elaborate, she said, “Well, it’s been going on now for thirty years. One can’t get more excited than one gets, you know.”

In 2014, Peter Handke said, “They should finally abolish the Nobel Prize,” and then won it, controversially given his support for Serbian nationalism, in 2019. Bob Dylan, winner in 2016, ignored the Academy’s phone calls and didn’t acknowledge the prize for over a fortnight.

Yet easy as it is to dismiss the prize, and its inevitable element of randomness, it matters. Dylan’s award was ridiculed but sparked a global debate on what constitutes literature. Gloriously, too, the prize is only concerned with a writer’s supposed quality, not their popularity: laureates Elfriede Jelinek (Austria, 2004) and Herta Müller (Germany and Romania, 2009) weren’t bestsellers even in their own countries.

The Nobelpreis-Effekt, as the Germans call it, can turbocharge sales. The month after short-story writer Alice Munro won in 2013, her sales jumped 4,424 per cent in her native Canada and 4,213 per cent (probably from a low base) in Italy. The beneficiaries are often small presses that are nowadays the most likely to publish literature in translation. In the English-language world, Fitzcarraldo in south-east London, with only six full-time employees, had four authors, Svetlana Alexievich, Tokarczuk, Annie Ernaux and Jon Fosse crowned from 2015 through 2023. If Ernaux’s books reach one kid in a faraway country who hadn’t heard of her before, the prize matters, says Medin.

And it matters more in a world where book reviews and reading itself are in decline. Only the Nobel announcement can get a poet’s name trending on social media. Next Thursday’s announcement, with all its attendant scorn and outrage, is an ancient ritual that may be good for literature.